https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/06/15/magazine/jon-stewart-interview.html
It’s like the Levittown thing with Bill O’Reilly. He talks all about Levittown: ‘‘That’s where I learned my values. Bootstrapping it. I grew up in Levittown, and we learned that work does it.’’ Well, guess what? The deed to the properties said you were not allowed to sell them to a black person. (The standard leases, which included an option to buy, for the first houses built by Levitt & Sons in the late 1940s for the Long Island community soon to be called Levittown included a clause barring the houses from being sold to or occupied by nonwhites. The clause was dropped in 1948, but the racial dynamics remained.)
Racism is built into this system. But not all the people in it are malevolent and active racists. There is an inert racism that exists, and it’s pernicious, but I don’t believe everybody who’s part of it is evil. So it’s more a question of trying to remove a right-left axis from the conversation and instead create a conversation around conditions. Poverty is poverty. The right will talk about poverty a certain way, and the left will talk about poverty a different way, but poor people are still poor people. They’re still without political power.